Wessex A Landscape History

Wessex is famous for its coasts, heaths, woodlands, chalk downland, limestone hills and gorges, settlements and farmed vales. This book provides an account of the physical form, development and operation of its landscape as it was shaped by our ancestors. Major themes include the development of agriculture, settlements, industry and transport.

Wessex is famous for its coasts, heaths, woodlands, chalk downland, limestone hills and gorges, settlements and farmed vales. This book provides an account of the physical form, development and operation of its landscape as it was shaped by our ancestors. Constituting no modern political entity, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom and archaeological province of 'Wessex' may be defined by its natural resources and connectivity by both land and sea, for its borders include the English Channel and Severn Estuary. Following the tundra environments that dominated south of the ice sheets during the past two million years, the Wessex area experienced dramatic changes in climate, something reflected in its soils and vegetation cover. Humans hunted in the 'wildwood' established after the Ice Age, then cleared the land for agriculture and settlement in a 6,000 year old process. In more recent times, areas of cultural importance and nature conservation have been established as well as a thriving economy based largely on natural resources, trade and manufactures. The region comprises the counties of Hampshire (including the Isle of Wight), Dorset, Wiltshire, historic Somerset, and Berkshire. Whether through Thomas Hardy, a water company service area, or a royal title, Wessex has lingered in the imagination and secured its place in the construction of English history. The reader is taken through not only the physical landscape, but also the human institutions that have affected its evolution, including manors, great estates, monasteries and hunting forests; major themes include the development of agriculture, settlements, industry and transport.

Wessex formed the heartland of Alfred the Great's kingdom, and continued to wield immense economic power long into the Middle Ages with many extensive and wealthy royal and ecclelesiastical estates. Contributors to this collection of 13 papers on the medieval landscape of Wessex include: B Eagles (The Archaeological evidence for settlement in the 5th to 7th centuries); D Hinton (The archaeology of 8th- to 11th-century Wessex); P Hase (The Church in the Wessex heartlands); D Hooke (The administrative and settlement framework of early medieval Wessex); M Costen (Settlement in Wessex in the 10th century); J Bond (Forests, chases, warrens and parks); J Hare (Agriculture and settlement in Wiltshire and Hampshire); C Lewis (The medieval settlment of Wiltshire); M Hughes (Towns and villages in medieval Hampshire); C Taylor (The regular village plan); M Aston (Medieval settlement in Somerset); S Rippon (Medieval wetland reclamation); R Croft (Protecting medieval settlement sites).

There have been many studies of the Scandinavians in Britain, but this is the first collection of essays to be devoted solely to their engagement with Wessex. New work on the early Middle Ages, not least the excavations of mass graves associated with the Viking Age in Dorset and Oxford, drew attention to the gaps in our understanding of the wider impact of Scandinavians in areas of Britain not traditionally associated with them. Here, a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the problems of their study is presented. While there may not have been the same degree of impact, discernible particularly in place-names and archaeology, as in those areas of Britain which had substantial influxes of Scandinavian settlers, Wessex was a major theater of the Viking wars in the reigns of Alfred and Æthelred Unræd. Two major topics, the Viking wars and the Danish landowning elite, figure strongly in this collection but are shown not to be the sole reasons for the presence of Danes, or items associated with them, in Wessex. Multidisciplinary approaches evoke Vikings and Danes not just through the written record, but through their impact on real and imaginary landscapes and via the objects they owned or produced. The papers raise wider questions too, such as when did aggressive Vikings morph into more acceptable Danes, and what issues of identity were there for natives and incomers in a province whose founders were believed to have also come from North Sea areas, if not from parts of Denmark itself? Readers can continue for themselves aspects of these broader debates that will be stimulated by this fascinating and significant series of studies by both established scholars and new researchers.

This volume draws together a series of papers that present some of the most up-to-date thinking on the history, archaeology and toponymy of Wessex and Anglo-Saxon England more broadly. In honour of one of early medieval European scholarship’s most illustrious doyennes, no less than twenty-nine contributions demonstrate the indelible impression Barbara Yorke’s work has made on her peers and a generation of new scholars, some of whom have benefitted directly from her tutorage. From the identities that emerged in the immediate post-Roman period, through to the development of kingdoms, the role of the church, and impacts felt beyond the eleventh century, the rich and diverse character of the studies presented here are testimony to the versatility and extensive range of the honorand’s contribution to the academic field.

The earthwork forts that crown many hills in Southern England are among the largest and most dramatic of the prehistoric features that still survive in our modern rural landscape. The Wessex Hillforts Survey collected wide-ranging data on hillfort interiors in a three-year partnership between the former Ancient Monuments Laboratory of English Heritage and Oxford University. These defended enclosures, occupied from the end of the Bronze Age to the last few centuries before the Roman conquest, have long attracted archaeological interest and their function remains central to study of the Iron Age. The communal effort and high degree of social organistation indicated by hillforts feeds debate about whether they were strongholds of Celtic chiefs, communal centres of population or temporary gathering places occupied seasonally or in times of unrest. Yet few have been extensively examined archaeologically. Using non-invasive methods, the survey enabled more elaborate distinctions to be made between different classes of hillforts than has hitherto been possible. The new data reveals not only the complexity of the archaeological record preserved inside hillforts, but also great variation in complexity among sites. Survey of the surrounding coutnryside revealed hillforts to be far from isolated features in the later prehistoric landscape. Many have other less visible, forms of enclosed settlement in close proximity. Others occupy significant meeting points of earlier linear ditch systems and some appear to overlie, or be located adjacent to, blocks of earlier prehistoric field systems.

The Ancient Ways of Wessex tells the story of Wessex’s roads in the early medieval period, at the point at which they first emerge in the historical record. This is the age of the Anglo-Saxons and an era that witnessed the rise of a kingdom that was taken to the very brink of defeat by the Viking invasions of the ninth century. It is a period that goes on to become one within which we can trace the beginnings of the political entity we have come to know today as England. In a series of ten detailed case studies the reader is invited to consider historical and archaeological evidence, alongside topographic information and ancient place-names, in the reconstruction of the networks of routeways and communications that served the people and places of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Whether you were a peasant, pilgrim, drover, trader, warrior, bishop, king or queen, travel would have been fundamental to life in the early middle ages and this book explores the physical means by which the landscape was constituted to facilitate and improve the movement of people, goods and ideas from the seventh through to the eleventh centuries. What emerges is a dynamic web of interconnecting routeways serving multiple functions and one, perhaps, even busier than that in our own working countryside. A narrative of transition, one of both of continuity and change, provides a fresh and alternative window into the everyday workings of an early medieval landscape through the pathways trodden over a millennium ago.